I think its important to think clearly when discussing these issues of overwieght and obesity. We are, basically talking about the biology and physiology of the body. I think its tempting to think of these issues in terms of morality. If you do good things and sacrifice, you get good things. If you do bad things and don't sacrifice, you get bad things. But none of this has anything to do with how the body works.

We know people get fat because they eat too much and/or move too little. That's not the question. The question is why do some people eat too much and move too little. Is it really because they are lazy or gluttonous? The carb/insulin hypothesis says that the arrow of causation is backwards. In other words, we don't get fat because we eat too much and move too little. We eat too much and move little, BECAUSE were getting fat!

I think its important to think clearly when discussing these issues of overwieght and obesity. We are, basically talking about the biology and physiology of the body. I think its tempting to think of these issues in terms of morality. If you do good things and sacrifice, you get good things. If you do bad things and don't sacrifice, you get bad things. But none of this has anything to do with how the body works.

We know people get fat because they eat too much and/or move too little. That's not the question. The question is why do some people eat too much and move too little. Is it really because they are lazy or gluttonous? The carb/insulin hypothesis says that the arrow of causation is backwards. In other words, we don't get fat because we eat too much and move too little. We eat too much and move little, BECAUSE were getting fat!

I think people move less when they get fatter because it becomes harder to move, and it makes people even fatter, but obviously the cause of getting fat is a calorie surplus.

Echoing what getfit1980 said, Taubes' book is about the biology of obesity. I don't agree with everything that's in there (including Taubes' contention that exercise is pointless for weight loss), but it does form a good basis for figuring out how to control dietary variables to keep weight down. If you see any of my posts in other threads, you'll see that we're on the same page regarding calories in vs. calories out. There's no doubt that calories matter. Mike already has a thread to your point called something like "hey fattie, excuses why you are fat" for people to air their misgivings. After you've admitted your excuses, figuring out what you're going to do about it is the next step.

Rubystars:

I think we need to step back here a moment. A lot of people conflate Taubes' work with the paleo community. It's easy to do since a lot of people who start with GCBC eventually make their way into paleo. But it's not the only theory of obesity floating around. Stephen Guyenet has a pretty well articulated food reward theory that IMO needs some more scientific rigor at this point (modern processed foods release too much dopamine, essentially turning them into dietary cocaine). Taubes' insulin hypothesis is on better scientific footing at the moment.

That said, I also think that from the outside, there is rightly a view that paleo evangelists live in a bubble of cognitive dissonance. I would argue that the people that are most vocal about paleo are those who have recently tried it (the "book version") and had success; these are people who have done numerous "diets" in the past and paleo is another "diet" that worked for them. As a result, for them there is only one "paleo diet" which excludes certain foods and includes others.

This cannot be repeated often enough, but THERE IS NO ONE, SINGLE ALL-ENCOMPASSING PALEO DIET. Arctic Inuits did not eat the same food as tropical islanders. Heck, even among islanders, there are nations where coconut and fat cuts of fish and wild pig were staples (very high fat), and other nations where root vegetables formed the base of every meal (very high starch). Also, most cultures outside of America and Europe supplemented their diets with insects. So it's fallacious to assume, for everyone, that there is only THE paleo diet as written. Or what I like to call, the "book version."

Disclaimer: I'm not professionally qualified to make any formal recommendations. I've just done my homework and I'm my own guinea pig. All of my data, unless otherwise cited, comes from a sample size of n=1 (me).

I don't think it oversimplifies it at all. You need to eat less than you burn to lose weight.

In theory, yes. You need to eat less than you burn to lose weight. But, it is much easier to eat less when you aren't hungry all the time. If I eat high carb vs. high fat, I feel hungry all the time, and I'm more likely to go off the rails. Same number of calories, world of difference.

Quote:

If you eat tons and tons
of meat every day that's a sure fire way to set yourself up for high cholesterol and a heart attack or stroke.

1) Taubes' downfall is that he lays out this beautiful theory but no explanation of how to actually implement it. People think it's a free license to baconize everything. Eating lots of meat isn't the best because of potentially carcinogenic byproducts of the cooking process, especially during grilling or roasting. The paleo implementation of this theory isn't as much meat as people think.

2) Unless you have familial hypercholesterolemia, eating cholesterol won't raise your blood cholesterol. Total blood cholesterol comes from both dietary and endogenous sources. In other words, eat more cholesterol, and your liver makes less of it. Eat less, and your liver makes more to make up the difference. What does raises cholesterol to a very significant effect is carbohydrate, particularly high-glycemic, refined carb, but also the lower glycemic stuff. Regarding saturated fat, Krauss et al. did a survey study of the last 30 or so years of saturated fat and heart disease research and found that there is no connection whatsoever between dietary saturated fat intake and incidence of heart disease.

3) High cholesterol doesn't cause heart disease. It might be a marker for inflammation and vessel damage. So the goal of any intervention should be to lower inflammation, not lower cholesterol. An analogy: lowering cholesterol is like trying to treat a scrape by reducing your access to band-aids. Greater use of band-aids is a sign that you're scraped up pretty bad. But your scrapes are not being caused by your greater use of band-aids.

Quote:

Some of our Ice Age ancestors (if your ancestos were in Europe) didn't eat very much vegetation because it wasn't available in big quantities on the wind blown steppes. However eating the way they did will lead to an early death. It didn't matter so much for them. They had children at young ages and lived long enough to pass on their lifeways and wisdom to the next generation, but by today's standards their lives were very short.

Just because we're trying to live longer than our ancestors doesn't mean that our lifestyles have to be drastically different. Paleo uses the ancestral lifestyle as a framework to build a sustainable lifestyle for modern humans. The modern approach scraps all of that and builds something from scratch, then claims that paleo is the approach that makes no sense.

Quote:

Fatness was valued (look at the Venus figures) because it meant surviving through times when less food was available.

This might say something about societal norms today. Slightly overweight people are actually the ones that live the longest in our society. Yet they're in the group that's maligned.

Quote:

I think today when we are in a state of constant plenty, avoiding fatness (which goes against our instincts) is the key to survival. Taking advantage of the phytonutrients, fiber, and vitamins and minerals found in vegetables and fruits makes sense.

Eating processed foods goes against our natural survival instincts because we're messing with our brain and body chemistry eating food that was never available naturally. Avoiding processed food is to follow our instincts. Eating plenty of vegetables and fruits is, in fact, in line with our instincts. Getting fat is not an instinctual drive, but a result of ditching instinct in favor of temptingly presented calorie bombs. On the other hand, if you do follow your instincts and start from an ancestral framework, you'd be hard pressed to find anything in there that will make you fat.

Quote:

Every major civilization has a carb based diet, and most of these carbs are grains. Grains didn't pop out of nowhere. Even our remote ancestors ate grass seeds sometimes, just not in the quantities we do today, and since the ice age, European people and those in the Middle East in particular have eaten a LOT of grain, and mostly, it benefited society.

Read Jared Diamond. The only way grains benefited society is that they enabled empires to keep standing armies in times of peace, away from the capital at regional fortresses. These societies trampled the ones whose soldiers were also farmers, teachers, doctors, etc. In short, grains are a cheap source of calories, easily stored, good to survive on, but not to thrive on.

Quote:

Whole grains also have a lot of minerals, antioxidants, phytonutrients, and fiber. To say we're not evolved to eat grain is taking a skewed view of evolution. Humans have always eaten seeds. Grass seeds are just another type of seed that was consumed in the distant past too. Refined grains aren't very good for you but whole grains are fine.

Whole grains don't have anything that you can't get from other sources. It's estimated that around 40% of the American population is gluten-sensitive (whether it's diagnosed or not), so there's no good reason to purposefully eat grains, whole or refined, if you can avoid them. To the point about seeds, and also non-gluten grains, many paleo advocates have no problem with them. I myself eat rice and quinoa occasionally and haven't had any problems with them. They just tend to be filling and crowd out the nutrient dense foods on my plate like other vegetables.

Quote:

Legumes aren't some abomination. They're also healthy for people. I have no idea why paleo eaters are against legumes.

Legumes are another one of those foods where if you can get the nutrients somewhere else, why eat them? They give a lot of people gas, many of them who are gluten-sensitive and already suffer from irritable bowel can get really messed up intestinal problems from all of that insoluble fiber, and the bean "meat" itself contains natural pesticides that can provoke an immune response similar to an allergy. I eat beans sometimes because I'm a foodie, not because of their supposed healthy qualities.

It's not terribly complicated. Get your vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, and fiber from leafy greens, fruits, nuts, and seeds. Get carbs, when you need them, from fruits, starchy root vegetables, honey, tree saps. Get protein and fat from meat, eggs, nuts and seeds. It's sustainable, and not all that expensive if you plan it well. It's certainly cheaper than medical bills. I've been at it for 3 years already. And if it doesn't work for you, so what? Go find something that does.

Disclaimer: I'm not professionally qualified to make any formal recommendations. I've just done my homework and I'm my own guinea pig. All of my data, unless otherwise cited, comes from a sample size of n=1 (me).

I'll come back and respond to your points later (have to go to work in a few minutes) but I probably agree with you more than I disagree. About grains and legumes though. If they were so horrible for us, then why is it that one of the main foods that kids ate when I was young were Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches, and it never harmed any of us?

I mean it had wheat and peanuts in them! I never heard back then of anyone having a bad reaction to the bread or to the peanuts (or any other type of nut, legume or not). If you listened to the modern gluten-free advocates and the "nut free zone" advocates then you'd assume all of us kids should've been falling on the floor having seizures.

I don't personally believe there's anything harmful in grains or nuts or legumes for most healthy individuals. I also have a tendency to believe that most gluten sensitivities and nut allergies are psychosomatic or completely fake because I never heard of any of this back in the 80s when I was growing up and every kid brought a PB&J to lunch (without having an anaphylactic shock attack, imagine that). Now I know that for a small portion of the population, that there are real wheat allergies, peanut allergies, celiac disease, etc. so if you have these conditions then I'm not talking about you, but I don't think it's nearly as common as people think it is.

Psychosomatic or not, IMHO it's not worth the shrink hours to correct a perceived gluten intolerance so it might be easier to just not eat gluten grains, since the nutrients are found elsewhere. (I'm not hating on psychiatrists, btw; I have psych friends).

I don't really believe that the anti-nutrients in grains or legumes do any significant damage over the short-term. I too, ate PBJ's in elementary school and literally pounds of pasta during my teenage growth spurt. It's the cumulative damage over the long term from three constituents I'm concerned about:

1) phytic acid, which is a very negative molecule that binds readily to positive ions like calcium, magnesium, and potassium and decreases absorption in the intestine;

2) lectins, which are plant proteins that can irritate the intestinal lining and increase it's permeability to larger molecules and proteins, which then provoke an allergy-like immune response;

3) canavanine, an amino acid found in beans that resembles arginine. It can take arginine's place in certain proteins, which screws up their structure and renders them useless. It also interferes with arginine's ability to stimulate the production of nitric oxide, which relaxes blood vessels and reduces blood pressure.

Here's three things I'm not concerned about:

1) natural saturated and monounsaturated fat, and w-3: SFA's are used as energy when there's little exogenous glucose floating around. Many also only raise HDL, and not LDL. Notable exception being palmitic acid, found in palm oil. MUFA's and w-3's produce anti-inflammatory byproducts. w-6's on the other hand, produce inflammatory byproducts.

Disclaimer: I'm not professionally qualified to make any formal recommendations. I've just done my homework and I'm my own guinea pig. All of my data, unless otherwise cited, comes from a sample size of n=1 (me).

I had to shorten some of the quotes because I went over the character limit.

Quote:

But, it is much easier to eat less when you aren't hungry all the time.

For most people, eating more protein helps. I can see that. It's just I see so much of the time when I lurk paleo boards that people seem to think that calories in/calories out doesn't matter at all.

Quote:

1) Taubes' downfall is that he lays out this beautiful theory but no explanation of how to actually implement it.

I'm curious as to how you implement it without excessive meat and without excessive legumes. Because you've got to get your protein from somewhere and if you're not overconsuming meat and eggs to get into a ketogenic state and you're staying away from tofu and beans (beans are about half protein/half carb if I recall correctly), then how are you getting enough protein to go low carb?

Total blood cholesterol comes from both dietary and endogenous sources.

The only ones I've ever seen say that saturated fat doesn't cause a rise in cholesterol are paleos. I don't think a moderate amount of it is harmful but if you eat a lot of saturated fat by consuming a lot of meat then I do think it will cause heart disease.

Quote:

3) High cholesterol doesn't cause heart disease. It might be a marker for inflammation and vessel damage.

You know what I've heard is a great anti-inflammatory food? Oatmeal. Also almonds and tuna, which are probably paleo, but I've never seen any evidence that oatmeal causes inflammation and I see it recommended on lists of anti-inflammatory foods. You know red meat (a paleo favorite) also causes inflammation. And vegetarians often say "why eat meat when you can get the same nutrition from other sources"? I'm not a vegetarian but they use the same argument you do for avoiding many of their favorite foods. My question is to counter all that, why NOT eat whatever foods are nutritious and eat a variety of them so that no one food has enough of a bad effect on you?

Quote:

The modern approach scraps all of that and builds something from scratch, then claims that paleo is the approach that makes no sense.

Well my point is modern paleos are not really eating and living the same way real paleos did, and if modern ones did, then they'd probably live about as long as the real ones did.

Quote:

Slightly overweight people are actually the ones that live the longest in our society. Yet they're in the group that's maligned.

It's wrong for people to hate people for being overweight. What's scary is that in a few thousand years society went from valuing someone having a little extra fat as a survival tool and a signal that someone was reproductively healthy, to seeing even someone at a normal, healthy weight as being "too fat" and preferring the anorexic look.

I think that people tried to eat as many calories as they could, when they could. History has always been feast and famine, and when famine times came, those with more fat survived better, and so that's why a lot of us have a genetic tendency to be fat. Many of the people who didn't died and didn't leave any descendants.

Quote:

In short, grains are a cheap source of calories, easily stored, good to survive on, but not to thrive on.

It benefited society by allowing people to settle, to create larger populations, to specialize into different crafts rather than having to spend so much time on survival activities, which eventually led to our modern tech.

Quote:

Whole grains don't have anything that you can't get from other sources.

Neither does meat.

Quote:

It's estimated that around 40% of the American population is gluten-sensitive (whether it's diagnosed or not), so there's no good reason to purposefully eat grains, whole or refined, if you can avoid them.

Considering for at least the last 10,000 years most people who had ancestors outside of Africa were eating bread, I'd say I'm fairly well adapted to grains. I think things like celiac and gluten sensitivity are rare because if for all that time people were eating bread those who couldn't tolerate it probably wouldn't have been as fertile.

If you went to someone in the Middle Ages and offered them a loaf of bread when they were hungry do you think, that it's even remotely possible that the person would say "Oh no thank you, bread makes me feel icky". Heck no! They'd eat it, and feel better afterward. I don't know what happened to people today. Why are people suddenly developing these strange reactions to things that have been safe for thousands of years? Why does someone today suddenly claim to be gluten intolerant when their great grandparents had bread at every meal and lived to a ripe old age? Could there be an environmental contaminant?

Quote:

To the point about seeds, and also non-gluten grains, many paleo advocates have no problem with them.

I just don't see what's wrong with gluten when most people in most of the civilized world ate it for millenia and they weren't lying on the floor suffering from it. Something must be different about today's people for them to suddenly start having issues with it. If it made people sick it never would have gained so much popularity.

Quote:

Legumes are another one of those foods where if you can get the nutrients somewhere else, why eat them?

They do have good nutrition in them and every type of food has some kind of chemical in them. The trick to that is eating a varied diet to balance it all out.

Quote:

It's not terribly complicated. Get your vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, and fiber from leafy greens, fruits, nuts, and seeds. Get carbs, when you need them, from fruits, starchy root vegetables, honey, tree saps. Get protein and fat from meat, eggs, nuts and seeds.

What I take issue with is that I think a lot of people are not really eating a healthy diet when they go 'paleo' but are actually gorging on red meat. They say they're eating like cave people but they don't even define which cave people or what time period they're emulating.

Quote:

Originally Posted by tandoorichicken

Psychosomatic or not, IMHO it's not worth the shrink hours to correct a perceived gluten intolerance so it might be easier to just not eat gluten grains, since the nutrients are found elsewhere. (I'm not hating on psychiatrists, btw; I have psych friends).

I just think that if people survived on wheat as a staple food for so long and now suddenly in modern times people are having bad reactions to it something must have either changed about the wheat, or some other factor must be at play here, because it's only in the last few years I've seen an explosion of "gluten free" products in the stores and people saying they're gluten intolerant, etc.

Either people are are reacting in mass paranoia or something has changed over the last few years. Suddenly people are having trouble with wheat and peanuts when I never ever heard about this in the 80s and 90s. It's not that people didn't have allergies back then or celiac, but it wasn't something that was common enough to be in the public eye like this.

Now I can't even give out halloween candy to the neighborhood kids without one or more of them piping up that they're allergic to peanuts (which I highly doubt, but I'm not their doctor so I would never test it). Forgive me if I'm really skeptical about this stuff but it seems like rare conditions have now become really common.

Quote:

It's the cumulative damage over the long term from three constituents I'm concerned about:

What about the antinutrients in cruciferous vegetables and squash? Almost every food has some kind of toxin or chemical that needs to be accounted for, red meat being no exception to that.

Quote:

1) phytic acid,
2) lectins,
3) canavanine

Thanks for the info. I still have to wonder if these are any worse than any other run of the mill things found in foods that we eat all the time that our livers are more than equipped to detoxify. Can't the bad effects be mitigated by eating a varied diet?

Quote:

Here's three things I'm not concerned about:

1) natural saturated and monounsaturated fat, and w-3

Most doctors will say to limit saturated fat. Are they really wrong?

Quote:

2) protein:
3) getting enough glucose:

I don't worry about getting enough protein because it's in almost every food. Also I agree with you that we don't need a lot of glucose.

[quote[I'm not trying to pick a fight or anything, I'm just a biochemistry nerd with time and a loud mouth. Don't take it personally [/quote]

I'm definitely not. Don't worry. I think this is interesting.

I think the main part I agree with you on is that less processed food is better, more natural food is better. I just don't like the way most paleos seem to approach this.

Thanks for your reply. Yeah, unfortunately there's a lot of bad science out there, and people can get pretty dogmatic about it (as with any dietary paradigm). I'm pretty sure neither you nor I have the complete picture and anyone who says they do is selling snake oil.

One thing I want to clarify about gluten is that with evolution you often get a change in the general shape and a few insertions/deletions of genes and proteins over time. To be honest, the gluten protein in early domestic wheat probably wasn't that bad. People also had to do real work to process it, since these field grasses grew to about 8 feet high and had hard, thorny shells covering the seed husks (like pine cones). Heritage strains of wheat like einkorn and emmer have fewer chromosomes (diploid, 14 chromosomes, and tetraploid, 28 chromosomes, respectively) and so their gluten proteins are actually relatively harmless. Modern wheat, on the other hand has 42 chromosomes (hexaploid) and is bred to be 2 feet tall and huskless (perfect height and exposure to be sucked into a harvester) as well as naturally more resistant to pests and fungus. I'm willing to bet modern gluten plays some part in this pest resistance too.

So the reason bread in the middle ages probably didn't affect people was that the more irritating form of the gluten protein is probably a more recent development. There are a few places online that sell emmer wheat. I want to try making bread at home with it.

Disclaimer: I'm not professionally qualified to make any formal recommendations. I've just done my homework and I'm my own guinea pig. All of my data, unless otherwise cited, comes from a sample size of n=1 (me).

I also wanted to add that paleo isn't a high protein diet. It can be low-carb for many people, but it doesn't have to be. Plus, protein's a pretty lousy energy source. I generally get between 50-60% fat, which usually means pouring olive oil over everything, and take fish oil daily. For protein I aim for 0.75 - 1g / lb lean mass. Since I'm estimating I'm around 20% body fat at 165 lbs, that usually amounts to around 100 - 130g of protein per day. Carbs vary based on physical activity.

As I mentioned before I don't believe there's such a thing as THE paleo diet, but it's a pretty handy framework or model to build from.

Also, Gary Taubes isn't really "paleo" per se; he's an Atkins advocate. Many people who follow a paleo-style plan have "evolved away" from Atkins.

Disclaimer: I'm not professionally qualified to make any formal recommendations. I've just done my homework and I'm my own guinea pig. All of my data, unless otherwise cited, comes from a sample size of n=1 (me).